A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray – Dominique Barbéris (2019, trans. John Cullen 2021) 152 pages

For the first Sunday of this month of novella reading, a novella set on a Sunday! I was alerted to A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray by Jacqui’s excellent review and so I was delighted when I came across a copy in my local marvellous charity bookshop.

“On Sundays, you think about life.”

The narrator (referred to as Jane on the French flap blurb although I don’t remember her being named in the text) goes to visit her sister in the Parisian suburb of Ville d’Avray for the afternoon. The sisters have intermittent contact and Jane’s urbanite boyfriend Luc seems to have an ambiguous relationship with both his in-laws and the suburbs. For this visit she is alone:

“And so I was full of memories, I was in the melancholy state of mind that often comes over me when I go to see my sister, and I think I started by getting a little lost in Ville d’Avray, by driving through the provincial, peaceful streets of my sister’s neighbourhood, past private houses their gleaming bay windows, their porches, their phony airs (Art Deco villa, Norman country house), their gardens planted with rosebushes and cedars.”

Nothing really happens, and yet the afternoon is full of significance. The sisters sit out in the autumn afternoon and Claire Marie recounts a chaste affair with a man called Marc Hermann. He has both a mysterious past and present:

“She was almost sure that he was lying to her about a great many things, but she felt certain that he was alone and that his solitude was complete, so dense that she could perceive the space it occupied around him, and that solitude touched her heart.”

It is the atmosphere rather than the plot that gives this novella its power. It captures perfectly that quiet, subdued feeling of a Sunday afternoon, anticipating the activity of the week ahead. There is also an unsettling quality to it: the fading light as the sisters sit, the repeated references to the forests that surround the suburb where Claire Marie and Marc would walk; the fear of burglars and invasion.

Jane is at once the first-person narrator and the silent interlocutor. This is a novella of liminal spaces: temporal, geographical and psychological. Barbéris expertly holds the reader between these spaces in the story, destabilising the narrative.  Nothing overt is said or done, but gradually there is a sense of not trusting what we are being told. But should Jane not trust Claire Marie or should the reader not trust the narrator?

I’m sure the atmosphere of this novella will stay with me. A perfect Sunday afternoon read.

“Ever since the neighbour had mowed his lawn, the whole street smelled of cut grass. I don’t know why the smell of cut grass can give you such a feeling of sadness, and also such a violent desire to keep on living.”